Safe place for ££££££££££

short_of_a_shilling!

Hello all, My husband and I have eventually found a buye for our homer. However, there is nothing on the market right now that we would want to buy and it looks like the sensible thing to do is move into a rental property and buy at a later date. Doing this would release our total life investment funds and we have no idea where we could put them and know they were safe. We will have very nearly 800K which represents everything to us and so we need to feel secure in our investment and be able to access the money again once the market picks up.

Any pointers would be so very gratefully received, very many thanks.

AlanP_2

Safest place would be NS&I, but interest rates barely above 0%.

eskbanker

short_of_a_shilling! said:

Doing this would release our total life investment funds and we have no idea where we could put them and know they were safe. We will have very nearly 800K which represents everything to us

It's an aside to your main question but if this is meant literally then it would be quite unusual to have your entire wealth trapped in a property, so when you get round to buying again you might wish to consider leaving yourselves with some accessible money in more liquid form....

lhsecons

short_of_a_shilling! said:

Hello all, My husband and I have eventually found a buye for our homer. However, there is nothing on the market right now that we would want to buy and it looks like the sensible thing to do is move into a rental property and buy at a later date. Doing this would release our total life investment funds and we have no idea where we could put them and know they were safe. We will have very nearly 800K which represents everything to us and so we need to feel secure in our investment and be able to access the money again once the market picks up.

Any pointers would be so very gratefully received, very many thanks.

The NS&I direct saver account currently pays 0.15% on up to £2 million so this would be the simplest place with 100% safety. You may decide to put £50,000 each into premium bonds which is likely to increase your return ( but obviously is not guaranteed to do so).
Otherwise the only way to get more would be to split the money into £85,000 chunks between the best paying accounts.

bowlhead99

lhsecons said:

short_of_a_shilling! said:

Hello all, My husband and I have eventually found a buye for our homer. However, there is nothing on the market right now that we would want to buy and it looks like the sensible thing to do is move into a rental property and buy at a later date. Doing this would release our total life investment funds and we have no idea where we could put them and know they were safe. We will have very nearly 800K which represents everything to us and so we need to feel secure in our investment and be able to access the money again once the market picks up.

Any pointers would be so very gratefully received, very many thanks.

The NS&I direct saver account currently pays 0.15% on up to £2 million so this would be the simplest place with 100% safety. You may decide to put £50,000 each into premium bonds which is likely to increase your return ( but obviously is not guaranteed to do so).
Otherwise the only way to get more would be to split the money into £85,000 chunks between the best paying accounts.

The FSCS allows coverage of up to £1m per person for 'temporary high balances' from certain major life events such as sale of your main residence or purchase of a new one. The temporary cover lasts for 6 months. So you could put all the money in the best-paying notice account and then spend the six months thinking about what other chunks to put it into.

After the £100k of premium bonds the best paying accounts with a term of less than a year will be about 0.55-0.6% for a month or two's notice or about 0.5% for instant access.   But there's no need to faff around with multiple accounts each, you could just dump it all in a joint account at Aldermore for example and reconsider your options in a few months.

eskbanker

bowlhead99 said:
The FSCS allows coverage of up to £1m per person for 'temporary high balances' from certain major life events such as sale of your main residence or purchase of a new one. The temporary cover lasts for 6 months.

12 months now:

FSCS protects temporary high balances in your bank account, building society account or credit union account of up to £1million for up to twelve months.

bowlhead99

eskbanker said:

bowlhead99 said:
The FSCS allows coverage of up to £1m per person for 'temporary high balances' from certain major life events such as sale of your main residence or purchase of a new one. The temporary cover lasts for 6 months.

12 months now:

FSCS protects temporary high balances in your bank account, building society account or credit union account of up to £1million for up to twelve months.

However, it used to be six months and they only upped it to 12 as a temporary thing due to the hassles of Covid;  last August,  people's six-months periods since the start of Covid were running out and it had been harder to get new accounts set up due to the disruption.   But it was not intended as a long term thing, and for temporary high balances caused by deposits made after 1 February 2021, it will go back to being only six-month protection.    Of course, they might decide to extend it again, but have not said they definitely will. 

The OP mentioned having found a buyer, not having actually received the cash (there can be months in between ) . So I assumed they wouldn't get it deposited until at least next month, by which time the compensation scheme will be back at only 6 months' protection.

Below is a link to the press release from last August and there hasn't been another updating one since.
Temporary High Balance coverage extended to 12 months | FSCS